To Boldly Go Where Few Have Tread

This is the "Godfather" of bad movies. Or we've all been told.

Let's set the scene: it's 2002. Eddie Murphy is riding a giant wave of notoriety that he found in the late 80's. A man who gained fame for being subversive, intelligent and often downright batshit, is now a household name. He just voiced a talking donkey in Shrek, and my God, he's proven that talented actors can still make money and make relevant movies with great performances. He worried us a little bit with some of his choices; "The Nutty Professor" and "Doctor Doolittle" aren't exactly high art. But those are just kids' movies, right? You can't expect Eddie Murphy to go all "Raw" in a children's movie. If you do, you're disgusting.

Enter Pluto Nash.

Pluto Nash is not a children's movie. Children's movies, often, are fun. Pluto Nash is a carefully crafted, billion dollar flop that was designed to hit all the right buttons. It followed the film formula to a "t", it got some of the biggest names in Hollywood, it spared no expense with special effects (and for 2002, this movie at least LOOKS fairly decent). But it wasn't good. It was never going to BE good. All Murphy's involvement did was bring its badness to the public eye. Without him, it would have been an easily forgettable B-movie with some "Hey!"-worthy celebrity sightings.

Pluto Nash is the movie Murphy should never have made. But as we sat down to actually watch it, we wondered: is this really the worst flop of all time? Or do we just believe that because it's what we've been told? Does the movie actually SUCK as hard as they say? Could it have been saved? Can things possibly have been any worse?

The Porn Version Has the Same Name

Oh, man, this movie!

I mean, it starts and it's like BANG, ShOOOOOM! And then the terrorists arrive and they're all like "POWPOWPOW", and Bruce Willis is like "Fuck this!" and a bunch of people die, and there are cops that totally don't do anything because Bruce Willis is doing their jobs better, and then Alan Rickman's like "AAAAAAAH" and then Christmas music plays!

That makes it a Christmas movie!

Yeah, the world is divided in two on this movie, between people who've never seen it and people who consider it a Christmas classic. A franchise that launched Bruce Willis' career, that gave us the magic of Alan Rickman for the first time, and taught us all a little bit about the importance of ingenuity and good footwear, Die Hard lives up to expectations. There are already many drinking games for Die Hard floating around the internet.

But how many of those games were crafted while watching the movie for the first time?

"I've Done Something Terrible!"

Happy Holidays, everyone! Christmas is here, and we here at For Your Inebriation couldn't be more excited. We love a good Christmas movie as much as the next guy. But you know what we love just as much?

Random senseless violence.

That's right, our Holiday drinking games are going to involve the baddest, bloodiest movies that have ever graced the winter season (without going into campy territory. Nobody wants to play a drinking game to "Jack Frost", right?). We begin with a game for our favorite "Christmas" movie: In Bruges. The story of two hitmen who get sent on holiday by their potty-mouthed boss after an assasination gone awry, to the most magical town in all of Belgium.

Never seen this movie? Experience the wonder and delight in Martin McDonagh's tight, beautiful story of guilt, friendship, and the beliefs people are willing to die for. All in fucking Bruges.

"Bruce Willis, You Can Fight Anything ...but YOURSELF!"

Is it just me, or has the action genre been a little weird this past decade or so? Maybe it has to do with the rise of CGI in feature length films, or maybe it's just as simple as a change in the aesthetics movie-goers look for when they see a film, but action lately movies have lacked punch. They feel the need to over explain, to drive exposition into the ground, dragging down the pace of the movie at the same time. Even Transformers, one of the highest grossing action movies ever, is bogged down by tedious dialogue-driven scenes; the movie doesn't get going until it's nearly over.

It's not that Looper doesn't do this, but that it threads its exposition and "character driven" scenes pretty well together with the guns and blood. It delivers its plot to the audience at breakneck speed, and only gives you just enough downtime to catch up with it...mostly.

I guess what I'm saying is what makes it a successful movie, and makes our drinking game successful as well, is Bruce Willis and Young Bruce Willis (I mean, Joseph Gordon-Levitt). What bogs it down is...everything else.

Drink ALL the Wine

This is by far the longest game we've played here at For Your Inebriation. The Godfather is an epic, clocking in at just under three hours of backstabbing, power-grabbing and high-stakes negotiation. Believe me when I say, though, that the length of the movie will not make the game any less difficult.

Ideally, this game can be used for any of the movies in the Godfather trilogy, but for the purposes of our test, we used the first in the series. We treated the game like a party. People were constantly coming in and out, we ordered a pizza, and the wine flowed like a river. A dark, slow movie like this didn't seem likely to be a huge conversation piece, but it was, and we all had a blast.

But what you really want to know, I bet, is how many bottles of wine we went through that night. The answer is six. Read on, good friends.